


bleeding the darkness of the void

by rhodanum



Series: songs of the stars [2]
Category: The Dragon Prince (Cartoon)
Genre: Dreams and Nightmares, Elf/Human Relationship(s), Fugitives, M/M, Non-Human Genitalia, Rough Sex, Tentacle Dick, Viren completely out of his depth, Visions, mentions of past Aaravos/Elarion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-02-29 15:59:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18781492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhodanum/pseuds/rhodanum
Summary: Aaravos didn't strike Viren as someone who could suffer from nightmares... and yet here they are now.





	bleeding the darkness of the void

**Author's Note:**

> This story is a companion-piece to my Aaravos/Elarion one, [**anchors in time.**](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18733456) Reading that story isn't strictly necessary to understand this one, though they work best in a pair. One scene in particular has far more weight if _'anchors'_ is read beforehand.

They rest during the day and travel at night, under the cover of darkness (“under the watch of the stars”, to hear Aaravos put it, but the Star Arcanum offers Viren not even a whisper, no matter how much he works and struggles at quieting all thought, all restlessness inside him, until there is only the silence of the void eternal). They stay well away from roads and settlements, instead traversing the sparsely-populated hinterlands of Katolis, where there is little danger of running into a Crownguard patrol or members of the constabulary and local militia.

 _(‘Lord Viren the Traitor,’_ they call him. _‘Lord Viren the Murderer’_ and the first time his eyes land on the roll of parchment with his likeness upon it, bile festers in his throat and fury burns in his stomach, enough to nearly make his vision go white at the edges. “Patience,” Aaravos counsels, still barely more than a shade in the afternoon sun, ghostly chin resting on his left shoulder, murmuring in Viren’s ear and making the fine hairs at the back of his head stand on end. “The day your detractors come to understand your greatness and your sacrifice is on the horizon”.)

They cut through the endless fens and fields of the Harmoor flood-basin and then begin climbing, toward the mighty Karaís range and the high-passes that will take them straight to the borderlands. With each passing day, Aaravos seems less like a phantasm of Viren’s own imagining and more… _alive_ , for lack of a better descriptor. Connected to the world around them, instead of merely projecting a mirror-image. He reaches his hands out to touch the petals of nightshade flowers or the rough bark of great oak and evergreen trees, with a careful, haunting sort of reverence. It stirs the sliver of an old memory at the back of Viren’s mind, a dream he used to have as a boy, of a single bright star in the deepest darkness, alone in its terrible intensity. When Aaravos reaches out and touches _him_ — now solid instead of vaguely ethereal, cold like the interstellar void, warm like a thousand burning suns, a baffling _paradox_ of sensation — Viren finds himself responding in spite of his better judgement. Tracing the constellations on starlit arms, fisting his hands in soft strands of silver hair when the elf’s mouth finds its way to his throat, desperate with the hunger of a thousand years.

This… he knows _this_ , at least, for a given value of _‘know.’_ Long years since he last bedded anyone or even felt much of a desire to do so, all his vitality and his passion channeled instead into his magic and the rearing of his children and the advising of a monarch. Yet memory and instinct guide him all the same and something like tattered, vicious pride blooms in his chest, when Viren wraps his fingers around one of Aaravos’ horns with almost bruising strength and very nearly makes the ancient elf fall apart against him. With all he has lost and all that was taken from him, made a desperate fugitive from his own people, Viren will seize what moments of pride and solace he can _get._

What he knows far less is what he should do in case of _ancient elf_ and _nightly terrors_ coming together, in one supremely unlikely combination.

It happens when they’re in view of the Karaís, their snow-capped peaks dominating the skyline. By now, Viren has come to grudgingly accept one particular inevitability of their strange arrangement — waking up with the elf draped all over him, holding fast and pinning him down into the sorry-excuse-for-bedding they have to rely on. Usually a heap of leaves and boughs and branches woven together, enough to keep them off the cold ground. Said inevitability also involves silver hair getting in his mouth and up his nose and making him sneeze and mutter less than flattering imprecations about Aaravos’ lineage. The elf only laughs, low and resonant, burying his face back into the nape of Viren’s neck and reaching between his legs, perhaps by way of apology, stroking him until all thoughts of annoyance and irritation are gone, replaced with raw heat and _want_ and _need_.  
  
It happens one afternoon, the deep shadow of Nimra, tallest of the Karaís, falling over them both. Viren is woken from his sleep by fitful, restless motion and he very nearly elbows the elf in the throat, purely on instinct. Aaravos clings to him even harder than usual, hard enough to leave bruise-marks that will take days to fade. He whispers a broken chant, but the words are too ancient, too strange to be understood by Viren’s ears, a thousand years’ worth of linguistic shift rendering them unintelligible, even with his knowledge of Draconis and other languages spoken in Xadia.

(“How can we understand each other? On my end, your words sound as if they’re spoken in modern Katolian, but that _can’t_ be right. Unless…” Viren receives a small smile and a patient hand-gesture, before he murmurs “it’s the blood-bond”, chains rattling as he shifts in place, heart hammering against his ribs with the _possibilities_ ).

Realization comes and his eyes go wide in surprise. Aaravos didn't strike Viren as someone who could suffer from nightmares... and yet here they are now. 

The elf is still holding him as if his life depends on it and, for a few moments, Viren is at a complete and utter loss as to what exactly he should be doing, frozen in place. It isn’t as if he has much in the way of experience when it comes to handling _someone else’s_ nightly terrors. He and Sigrid… they spent much of their marriage in different bedchambers and she was always the one to wake up and go to the children in the night, as if possessed by some sixth sense. After the end of it all, Viren spent far too much time down in the laboratory — focused on research and experimentation and breakthroughs and adding to the grimoire that would be passed down to the next High Mage — to be there when Soren and Claudia needed soothing after a nightmare.   

Wait it out? Let it pass and not say a thing about it, as if it never happened? His plain _discomfort_ at being put in this situation is warring mightily with his burning curiosity as a scholar. Viren’s inability to understand what Aaravos is saying means that there are a great deal of even simple things the elf is capable of withholding from him even with the bond in place. Far more than he initially anticipated. Just as it means that Aaravos has enough self-control in place that he can obscure his words even in the middle of a night-terror.

That particular realization sends a chill down Viren’s spine.

(“Someday, that curiosity of yours will see you right in a dragon’s maw,” Master Llewellyn used to say, with a disparaging little click of the tongue against front-teeth and Viren thought his old teacher’s prediction well and truly come to pass when he stood face to face with Thunder and stared his own destruction right in the eyes. Now… now he’s far less convinced that the dragon in question needs to be a _literal_ one.)

“Wake up,” Viren says gruffly, trying to twist around and shake Aaravos right out of the nightmare. He isn’t particularly successful, the elf’s entire weight atop him, his right arm unable to do more than flail awkwardly as he tries to turn it from the shoulder and elbow. Not much success there either. “Wake up!”

What he can see of Aaravos’ skin unsettles him. Instead of burning brighter, as he expected they perhaps would, the constellations have dimmed, beautiful starlight faded into something distant, white dwarfs on a dark canvas (“the oldest beacons of the cosmos,” Aaravos told him, on a clear night, with the skies open above them. “So ancient that none have yet cooled enough for their light to perish.”) For a quick, wild moment, Viren thinks that this might be the work of the dragon-curse, one last, terrible gasp, meant to rip Aaravos out of the world and seal him back into his prison in the In-Between. But no, it’s not possible — the curse broke, they both _felt it,_ a lancing, blinding pain, the world falling at wrong angles, like the shards of a mirror.   

What else, then? Are dreams so fundamentally different for the Startouch that they risk losing themselves in them, adrift in the currents of the vision? Viren doesn’t know the answer to that. There are a great many questions — far too many he never even thought to _ask_ , before Aaravos — that he doesn’t know the answer to and it _rankles_ , like sandpaper grinding against his bones.

And then there is a part of him — still wounded, still bleeding since _that night —_ that wants to snap and snarl out “I see his face every single time I close my eyes! What cause have _you_ to lose yourself like this?” But he swallows the terrible words, forces them right back down his throat, because that is only for himself, a grief no other has any right to intrude upon. 

Taking in a deep breath, the sharp smell of wood-chips and pine-needles filling his nose, Viren moves — slow, with careful, deliberate motions, the way his fencing instructors taught him, long before that damnable knee-injury put paid to all of his efforts with the blade. In small increments, he manages to twist himself so he’s almost face-to-face with Aaravos, the elf shifting and pressing his cheek against his shoulder. In this position, it’s far easier to move his arms, right palm touching the back of Aaravos’ head, fingers stroking the soft strands of hair, far softer than those of any human.

As far as he’s concerned, Viren is working entirely on improvisation, so far out of his depth that it would perhaps be amusing, if it wasn’t a joke made entirely at his expense. And if it wasn’t for the nagging worry at the back of his skull. Fingertips work their way through the elf’s hair, slowly and methodically. They comb through it in a way Viren vaguely remembers enjoying as a child, when one of the scullery maids would do it, upon finding him asleep at the table, surrounded by untouched food and a small mountain of books and notes. 

“Listen to me,” Viren says, working as much authority into his voice as he can. A tall order, dressed in rags, lying on a pile of forest-mulch, with a sleeping elf on top of him. Yet he’s always been creative and resourceful. “Listen and focus on my voice. Whatever it is you’re seeing… none of it is _real_. I don’t particularly care if it’s a vision of the future or some imagined terror your mind cooked up. Come back to the here and now. Come back to me."

Perhaps it’s instinct. Perhaps it’s older knowledge that seethes in his veins, like the strange, surreal dreams of his boyhood. Whatever the reason, Viren has enough presence of mind to close his eyes and _focus_ as he says the words in Aaravos’ ear. Focus on the dark, burning band that ties them together, the thread that starts from the scar on his left palm and ends in the same mark on Aaravos’ own hand. There is a connection between them now, deeper than the roots of the mountains. Aaravos has opened up shadowed chambers in his mind for him, long enough for Viren — ever-clever, ever-resourceful — to understand how he _might_ reverse the process and open the connection himself, without any aid from the Startouch mage.

And then he’s falling. Through an empty hollow, through a valley of bleached bones, through the terrible, infinite blackness between the stars. For a few heartbeats, Viren panics, nearly loses himself in the unfathomable void, before taking another breath and centering himself. He grits his teeth and seizes the thread with both hands, even when it sears a line of blackness right into his palms. Stops his fall and drags himself forward by dint of dogged determination and stubborn willpower, until he’s somewhere else entirely.

Aaravos is lying underneath him, seemingly dead to the world, eyes wide and unseeing, Viren riding him without mercy. _“With me,”_ he orders, catching Aaravos’ chin between thumb and forefinger, leaning in and speaking against the lobe of his ear. _“Stay here with me.”_

There are other things, other images, other sounds — shouts and screams and the pungent smell of blood. Flashes of battlefields, of the dead and the dying. Aaravos, features cracking in his frenzied despair, a gaping hole in his chest, bleeding the darkness of the void. But he doesn’t understand them and they’re a confusing, utterly jumbled disaster, so Viren’s mind filters them out, focuses only on the Startouch mage underneath him. Snaps his hips down on his cock, groaning when the tendrils fill him up and stroke him from the inside.

And then Aaravos finally answers. Surges forward and up like a wild thing, crushes their mouths together, bites at Viren’s lips, drags his teeth over tender, bleeding flesh and laps hungrily at it. Viren returns the attention, the hand in Aaravos’ hair curling into a fist, yanking his head back to expose the beautiful glittering column of his neck. He kisses and nips at the skin, smiles in satisfaction when Aaravos shudders against him.

The interstellar void is gone, the graveyard of bones is gone and Viren can hear the sounds of the forest once more, all around him. Aaravos is underneath him, thrusting up into him at a desperate pace and Viren matches the rhythm of his movements, bringing his hips down with relentless force. Dozens of tendrils work at him, caressing that point that makes him breathe hard, through gritted teeth, vision narrowing down to a single, restless point, a race toward climax.  

When the orgasm hits, he sinks his teeth into star-filled skin, at the tender junction between throat and shoulder, licks and suckles at the dark-purple bruise that will bloom there soon enough. Aaravos gasps and moans and bucks against him, wet heat blooming between them, where he spills himself inside Viren.

Dragging in great lungfuls of air, salty sweat falling right in his eyes and making them sting, Viren lets himself slump on top of Aaravos. He doesn’t know how they managed to shift positions without him fully realizing it — and, frankly, he doesn’t particularly _care_ now, in the pleasant afterglow of release. One soft-skinned, four-fingered hand moves carefully over his back, tracing several painful lines that Viren suspects are scratches inflicted on him in the wildness of their coupling. He doesn’t much care about that either.

“Will I have to do this every single time you go and have a nightmare? Is it some sort of Startouch elf thing you failed to tell me about?”

Perhaps he meant the words to be sharp, recriminating. They’re not. The most Viren can muster up in this mellow interval is a strange, mellow sort of exasperation, chin resting in the crook of Aaravos’ shoulder, body pillowed against the elf’s greater height, heart-rate winding down. Add this thing to the rapidly growing list of what he doesn’t know and didn’t even think to ask, until now.

Aaravos chuckles, the sound reverberating through his bones and into Viren’s ears. “No need. This was very much a single occurrence. It will not happen again and you need no trouble yourself with it.”  
  
An answer meant to soothe. To placate. Even in this soft, pleasant haze, it strikes a discordant note within Viren, so used to pushing further, to questioning, to dissecting a problem until he can see it and its potential solutions from all angles.

“It had something to do with our bond, didn’t it? With the blood-pact.”  
  
He asks the question on a hunch, an intuitive leap. Viren has never been overly fond of intuition, by itself — it may provide potential theories and solutions, but those theories and solutions need to be testable and they need to be _reproducible_ , for him to be satisfied with their soundness. And with skewed or plain incorrect information, intuition becomes less than worthless.  
  
And yet here, now, for the moment, it’s the only thing he truly has.

“Perhaps.”  
  
Never lies, does he? That certainly doesn’t keep Aaravos from being as evasive as he pleases, Viren grouses to himself. If it weren’t for the post-coital afterglow, he would perhaps pull back, snap at the elf in the same way he did when he gripped the chair with both hands and threatened to smash the mirror to a thousand pieces.

Instead, Viren lets out a slow breath and settles for “Leave the half-answers and the rhetorical games and give me a _clear_ explanation. At one point, you were so far away that it felt as if nothing I did could reach you.”

He says the last words on a low, quiet tone, instinctively tracing a pattern through the stars covering Aaravos’ chest, marking constellations that don’t exist and that bear no name, in the tongues of humans or elves or dragons. It’s perhaps the exhaustion getting to him, long days of marching and eating nothing but what he can forage from the land. Otherwise Viren knows he wouldn’t have been so open with the uncertainty in his voice. The worry over some nameless thing that failed to happen.

“It was,” Aaravos begins, after several minutes of since, his own fingers still dancing across the sharp markings between Viren’s shoulder-blades, “a combination of factors. Our bond, yes. But also the place we find ourselves in.”

“This forest?” Sleep beckons him like a lover and Viren closes his eyes, but makes an effort to stay awake and hear what else Aaravos has to say.

“The forest, the rivers, the mountains. This is a land that was once… very familiar to me. A long time ago, before Katolis was ever named such.”

Not the whole answer, not by far. But at least _part_ of it. And Viren is too tired, too wrung-out by hard travel and by the effort it took to pull himself along their bond, to press further. So, for now, he settles with this explanation, shifts to make himself more comfortable and mutters “we leave when the sun sets.”

The palm between his shoulder-blades moves upward, gently stroking through his hair, longer than he’s ever worn it, matted and tangled and sweat-streaked. “As always, your wishes are mine to obey.”

Above them, Nimra stands like an ancient, weather-worn sentinel, piercing the sky, the first stars blooming over its jagged peak.


End file.
